Today marks day 3 of reading Atomic Habits, and this book keeps impressing!
The book itself is very highly rated on amazon https://amzn.to/3x4K7Sa (affiliate link to book), boasting a 4.7 star rating over 157,532 reviews. The book also claims to have sold over 15 million copies as of Oct. 16, 2018 and has sold over 20 million copies as of Mar. 4, 2024.
This chapter follows up Chapter 2, where we learned about becoming identity focused opposed to outcome focused. Without further ado, let’s get into the chapter review!
Chapter Summary:
- “A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic” This line is pretty self-explanatory, but if you didn’t know, there you go!
- “The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible” This line is basically stating that if you do something habitually, it will take less energy/effort, which is our goal. By making a habit of something, you will have more energy to deal with the other problems that you face.
- “Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.” Cue, craving, response, and reward were the major topic of this chapter. Cue is something that causes a craving, for example if you entered a dark room (the dark room is the cue), you develop a craving for light. Craving of course is a desire for something, most people would rather be in a room with light, instead of a dark room, during the day. The craving then causes a response. The response is to flip the light switch, filling the room with light. This response of turning the lights on causes the reward of the room being filled, which is satisfying the craving you had for the room to be lit up. Understanding this cycle is crucial to understanding your own habits and how to fix them. I myself, realized that I have a bad habit for how I wake up. I wake up by going onto my computer and watch YouTube videos, while eating breakfast. This cycle makes it so that when I’m done eating, I continue to binge watch videos for longer than I wanted, and then when I’m finally done watching videos, it feels impossible to do the work I have to do.
- “The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.” Also explained is the inverse for breaking bad habits: (1) make it invisible, (2) make it unattractive, (3) make it difficult, and (4) make it unsatisfying. The actual meaning of each step isn’t talked about in this chapter, as it is said to be the topic of Chapter 4, but despite that I think we can make assumption as to what each step means. I believe an example of step 1 would be if you had homework/work to do, then leave it on your desk, or computer, open, so when you go to your desk you will see it. I’ll be honest, it’s much harder for me to make assumptions as to what 2,3, and 4 are getting at, so I will leave that for the Chapter 4 Review.
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